![]() It happened in 20, when the Tea Party movement rode racism, sexism and anti-Obama sentiment to a wave of electoral successes. It happened in the early 2000s, when George W Bush abandoned the ‘ compassionate conservative ’ identity he had used during his election campaign and surrendered to the warmongering neoconservatives – a group who had been plotting their rise throughout the previous decade, and seized on the fallout from 9/11 to implement their world-spanning vision. In other words, they buck – hard.Ī similar thing happened in 1980, when Ronald Reagan finally won the Presidency after a 20-odd-year project to make right-wing conservatism the GOP’s true gravitational centre. The latter groups, once welcomed into the GOP, then quickly set to work taking over the party, aggressively shifting their own views from the fringe to the mainstream, and marginalising the previous generation of Republicans – now the ‘moderates’ – who are swiftly denounced as cowards, sellouts, ‘cucks’, or RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Seeking to harness the energy, motivation and raw numbers of the latter groups, the establishment appeals to their base desires with coded but legible dog whistle messaging, in the belief they can gather these horses and ride them to electoral victory without getting bucked off. The relation between these two poles rests on a simple dynamic. The fringe also includes the paranoid, decentralised conspiracy networks such as election denialists, QAnon, and the InfoWars crowd. The American right comprises two poles: the establishment, represented by the Republican Party (the GOP), which is fundamentally driven by the interests of American industry and big business and the fringe, a loose gaggle of factions including Evangelical Christians, far-right militia groups, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and cultural reactionaries (all three exemplified by terminally-online, late Kanye hanger-on Nick Fuentes ). It’s their house now, and they’ve made themselves comfortable. One day, you turn around and try to marshal them, only to learn that they don’t answer to you. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you invite certain forces in to serve your short-term interests. In a way, it was a tidy metaphor for a dynamic that’s driven the evolution of the American right for over six decades now. ![]() Throughout the broadcast, you can see Jones sighing, exasperated, and staring up at the ceiling with frustration as he attempts to rein in West, only for this bigger celebrity to scold him for interrupting, swat him away, and continue as before. ![]() When West responds by saying, “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis,” Jones howls with performative laughter before saying, with a touch of panic, “I have to disagree with that.” In one neatly summarising clip, Jones states that he disagrees with West’s attacks against “Jewish banks”. ![]() Repeatedly, Jones tried (and failed) to keep the car on the road by clarifying West’s remarks. After several weeks in which he descended ever deeper into conspiratorial rants and overt antisemitism (applauded and legitimised along the way by mainstream figures like Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool ), West placed a brick on the accelerator when he used his InfoWars cameo to declare his admiration of Adolf Hitler and his love for the Nazi Party. This radicalisation appeared to have finally hit its limit this week with Kanye West’s surprise appearance on InfoWars, a long-running internet television broadcast hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. ![]() Have you heard? It’s a perennial topic in American politics, but the latest series of discussions kicked off with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 his defeat in 2020 the Capitol insurrection on Januand the eruption of increasingly fringe views that has unfolded ever since. ![]()
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